Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday January 12, 2010 @05:51PM
from the thought-they-were-friends dept.

snydeq writes "The group that took down Twitter last month has apparently claimed another victim: China's largest search engine Baidu.com. Offline late Monday, Baidu.com at one point displayed an image saying 'This site has been hacked by Iranian Cyber Army,' according to a report in the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party and other Web sites. The Iranian Cyber Army first gained notoriety with its Dec. 18 Twitter attack. Baidu's domain name records were the focus of the hack. On Monday, the company was using domain name servers belonging to HostGator, a Florida ISP, instead of the Baidu.com nameservers the company normally uses."

(AP) SHANGHAI - While the Iranian Cyber Army stymied Baidu engineers early Tuesday morning, a Chinese government official reportedly praised the Iranian Cyber Army and it's successful attempts at further curbing the dangers away from Chinese citizens. After forcing Baidu to remove the ability to find porn or dissidant materials via searches, the Chinese government noted that the Iranian Cyber Army had finally successfully achieved that with absolutely no infractions.

Cai Wu of The Ministry of Culture in China said, "We are impressed with preliminary reports of zero searches returning offensive materials while the Iranian Cyber Army improved the search page." Wu also pointed out that nowhere in the Tao Te Ching is a reference to Baidu made and therefore it is one of the major factors in China losing its sense of nationality and pride. Wu held up an image of Laozi [wikimedia.org] and said, "Does this happy citizen look like he needed Baidu? No. All he needed was his government's ability to protect him from himself." Wu's only criticism of the 'attack' was simply that he expressed lament "it was not a group of loyal Chinese citizens who made children friendly adjustments to the search engine." Wu showed that the static page replacing the search page loaded on average 33% faster and required no user interaction to facilitate.

The Chinese government and the Iranian government have exchanged notes on how to keep their people from finding materials and lies that erode their ability to protect the cultures and citizens of their respective countries. But with the recent cross country attacks, it appears as though a group in Iran has one-upped the Chinese and shown them the beautiful results of hacking in comparison to the oafish and ugly heavy handed government shutdowns. This means, of course, that a stark internet censorship gap exists widely between the US and China. And other world powers trail far behind Iran and China -- shining examples of the firm yet gentle hand of internet censorship. Rest assured, this reporter has an inkling that a nationalistic competition could take hold similar to the space race or peace race. If there's one sport the winter Olympics might add next, certainly it's the sport of suppressing information.

China is not sitting idly by though, as strategic and selective abortions have left 24 million men without mates [yahoo.com]. The Chinese government believes this strategy will put them in solid first for socially awkward sexually frustrated males that must argue on internet forums while coding day and night taking breaks only for World of Warcraft (the most demanding mistress of them all). An army of hackers angry at everyone else will undoubtedly arise form this group willing to stop the flow of information worldwide.

"Sex-specific abortions remained extremely commonplace, especially in rural areas," where the cultural preference for boys over girls is strongest, the study said, while noting the reasons for the gender imbalance were "complex."

One particularly ugly consequence that the articles does not mention is this: [factsanddetails.com]

In some places men are marrying their first cousins and even their sisters through deals made with relatives because that is only way they can find a wife. The practice is so common that some communi

Right. But instead of channeling that rage toward WoW as Eldavojohn jokinly pointed out, that collective anger can be manipulated and directed towards the enemy-of-the-day, even if it is the people themselves. You will have hordes of people, full of self-loathing due to their discord between their urges and their society, who will take out their frustrations hacking foreign governments and ratting out remain

Chortle. (Don't see why this was modded "interesting" rather than "funny".)

But seriously:

I'm wondering how long it would take for the Chinese authorities to notice if a similar hijack took the searchers to a site that LOOKED like the real one but:
- gave them uncensored search results
- with the links that would be blocked by the Great Firewall redirected through unblocked proxies.

Obviously launching this from anywhere INSIDE China would make the perpetrator a likely candidate for involuntary organ donation. But can you imagine the trial of someone from OUTSIDE China who was caught after perpetrating such a thing? THAT might set some interesting precedents.

The authorities might take a while to notice; but the site operator would notice the drop in load pretty quickly. From there, for business reasons and out of desire to not upset the powers that be and join a blocklist later, the operator would presumably take corrective action as soon as they could. The state doesn't have to watch everything if it can make watching the rest align with the interests of private parties.

Not if the fake site made the equivalent query to the real site. (It could even forward the ads so the real site wouldn't lose revenue - unless the real site's software decided that the ads were mostly going to a small number of IP addresses and didn't count them as unique views.)

If it were done that way the only way the site operator would know anything was wrong is if he noticed the change in IP address distribution on the queries - or ha

Dude, I applaud your effort and wish to give you all my funny mod imaginary points (which I have 15 left)so think of yourself as a +15 Funny man.

PS- on a serious note, I really feel disgusted by the link you sent about the gender selective abortions, I had never heard of that, thank you for that link, it makes me more aware of the oppression over there!

When I was in high school, I'd read something like this and the first thing that would pop into my head would be: "cool!" Now the first thing that comes up is: "what a bunch of assholes." Has hacking* finally lost its mystique? I just see these guys as a bunch of idiots who enjoy defacing property and crave attention (ie. vandals).
* If the pejorative use of the term offends you, just pretend I used some other word that is more suiting

No, you got older and your view of the world has changed significantly. Teenagers, especially boys, just love to see the world burn. As we get older and have more invested in said world, the fires tend to lose their luster.

I dont know if its true that teenagers want the world to burn so much as they don't want to obey the rules. I guess its due to puberty or something. It happens in Elephants as well. "Teenage" elephants will go on rampages, raping female elephants and attacking male ones unless older, stronger Male elephants are around to challenge them. I think its just part of growing up for us Humans. I agree that hacking is a just another asshole activity.

When I was in high school, I'd read something like this and the first thing that would pop into my head would be: "cool!" Now the first thing that comes up is: "what a bunch of assholes." Has hacking* finally lost its mystique?

Well, even when I was younger, I didn't really think hacking a site only to spread a political message was all that cool. Now, hacking into a site and changing all the acronyms around and waiting to see how long it would take for the company to notice I would probably still think amusing.

When you have seen the same hack for the 1 billionth time it gets old...

This sort of thing is no longer a 'hack' but just ordinary vandalism. Much as you would marvel at the spray paint on the underside of a bridge and think 'how did they do that' but then think 'what a jerk'...

I am sure they control their own DNS servers one way or another. This attack clearly changed the setup of their domain name at register.com to delegate it to different domain name servers. Normally you do that through an SSL connection so I assume that they got hit by a dictionary attack, possibly assisted by a loose lipped employee "All my passwords are characters from Toy Story" or some such.

Their security services basically for free (if you don't count the downtime). They're doing a great job exposing all those backdoors to everyone who would otherwise be fine just quietly exploiting them as often as possible to potentially do things far more nefarious.